RHODIA OPERATIONS, France

As a global chemical company, SOLVAY assists industries in finding and implementing ever more responsible and value-creating solutions. Its products serve diversified markets worldwide, varying from energy and the environment to automotive and aeronautics or electricity and electronics as well as consumer goods, with one goal: to raise the performance of its clients and improve society’s quality of life. The group is headquartered in Brussels, employs about 29,400 people in 56 countries and generated 10.2 billion euros in net sales in 2014, of which 90% are in activities where Solvay is among the world’s top three players. It is through Solvay’s Research & Innovation that the leadership positions of its businesses are strengthened. Driven by proud and committed chemists, Solvay wants to lead the way in pioneering technologies that ask more from chemistry, finding answers to the challenges of increasingly scarce resources, a growing population, climate change, and sustaining health and well-being. More specifically, as the world’s leading producer of specialty surfactants and a major player in the polymers, guar and phosphorus derivatives markets, the Global Business Unit Solvay Novecare develops leading edge technologies that affect the behavior of fluids to give them cleansing, softening, moisturizing, hydrating, gelling, texturizing, penetrating or dispersing properties. Relying on a global network of 28 production sites and 10 R&I centers and labs, Novecare’s products are found in shampoos, detergents, paints, lubricants, plant protection, mining and oil extraction.